Cite as: 511 U. S. 328 (1994)
Opinion of the Court
mentioned. There is thus no express support for petitioners' claim of a waste-stream exemption.1
Petitioners contend, however, that the practical effect of the statutory language is to exempt the ash by virtue of exempting the facility. If, they argue, the facility is not deemed to be treating, storing, or disposing of hazardous waste, then the ash that it treats, stores, or disposes of must itself be considered nonhazardous. There are several problems with this argument. First, as we have explained, the only exemption provided by the terms of the statute is for the facility. It is the facility, not the ash, that "shall not be deemed" to be subject to regulation under Subtitle C. Unlike the preamble to the 1980 regulations, which had been in existence for four years by the time § 3001(i) was enacted, § 3001(i) does not explicitly exempt MWC ash generated by a resource recovery facility from regulation as a hazardous waste. In light of that difference, and given the statute's express declaration of national policy that "[w]aste that is . . . generated should be treated, stored, or disposed of so as to minimize the present and future threat to human health and the environment," 42 U. S. C. § 6902(b), we cannot interpret the statute to permit MWC ash sufficiently toxic to qualify as hazardous to be disposed of in ordinary landfills.
Moreover, as the Court of Appeals observed, the statutory language does not even exempt the facility in its capacity as
1 The dissent is able to describe the provision as exempting the ash itself only by resorting to what might be called imaginative use of ellipsis: "even though the material being treated and disposed of contains hazardous components before, during, and after its treatment[,] that material 'shall not be deemed to be . . . hazardous.' " Post, at 346. In the full text, quoted above, the subject of the phrase "shall not be deemed . . . hazardous" is not the material, but the resource recovery facility, and the complete phrase, including (italicized) the ellipsis, reads "shall not be deemed to be treating, storing, disposing of, or otherwise managing hazardous wastes." Deeming a facility not to be engaged in these activities with respect to hazardous wastes is of course quite different from deeming the output of that facility not to be hazardous.
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